02.12.1999

Action stations

Tom Delargy believes that the split within the Committee for a Workers International in Scotland could end the toleration of factions in the Scottish Socialist Party

There are occasions when socialists can only watch political organisations falling apart from the sidelines, our active engagement with the process limited to rubbing our hands with glee. There are other occasions when we are duty-bound to intervene, solidarising with one side against another, offering advice on how the (relatively) progressive side ought to fight. Clearly the Tories’ problems with Jeffrey Archer fall into the first category, while New Labour’s problems with Ken Livingstone very much fall into the latter. For now, however, I want to focus on the Committee for a Workers International in Scotland.

I had heard that a serious split inside the organisation was on the cards. Even so, when I read the Scottish CWI documents (Weekly Worker November 18), they filled me with dread. The most cursory glance is all it should take to make any revolutionary or independent-minded leftist, feel extremely anxious. The only possible interpretation that can be put on the document written by comrade Alan McCombes (‘Marxism in the new millennium’, endorsed by six out of seven members of the SCWI executive) is that the SSP will (if they have anything to say about it) follow the Socialist Labour Party down the road of witch hunts and voiding of branches. I would urge the minority CWI loyalists inside the Scottish Socialist Party, and all SSP revolutionaries outside the CWI (and those revolutionaries in England and Wales who point to the SSP as the model for a broad workers’ party in England and Wales) to critically examine this document.

Examine in particular point seven of its proposals. Peter Taaffe’s strategy is denounced by Alan McCombes in terms identical to those with which Neil Kinnock denounced Militant at the time he dragged them both before a series of kangaroo courts. He then justifies the hostility of non-revolutionaries to the type of caucusing Militant, and others, have always advocated: “It would be a mistake for the ISM to function as a tightly knit caucus with a predetermined position on all the day-to-day tactical, organisational and policy issues that arise. [The ISM - International Socialist Movement - is the latest in a never-ending round of renaming the CWI’s Scottish section.] Such an approach towards the SSP would not advance the cause of Marxism within the party, but would generate suspicion and resentment among non-ISM members.” This article is disgraceful, representing as it does unmitigated surrender to those who expelled Militant from the Labour Party.

Would it be unreasonable to suppose that the Welsh windbag has exacted revenge on the Labour Party’s ‘parasites’ by organising Kinnockite entryists into Scottish Militant Labour? Probably. Yet Peter Taaffe’s supporters in Scotland (Phil Stott, Harvey Duke, etc) ought to be preparing for being witch-hunted out of the SSP by those who were, along with them, witch-hunted out of the Labour Party.

CWI members have on paper, for the moment at least, overwhelming strength inside the SSP. All area organisers are CWI fiefdoms. The industrial organiser is a CWI member. The editor of the paper is also. And our elected Glasgow city councillor and MSP, Tommy Sheridan, is a CWI member. Their preponderance at the SSP’s founding conference was such that they withdrew their motion on the single currency. Not because they feared they would suffer humiliation. On the contrary, they did so because they had the numbers to get it passed, and did not want to alienate Hugh Kerr, the party’s European parliamentary candidate, Allan Green, the national secretary, and Bill Bonnar, the editor of the party’s magazine - all of whom support the single currency!

The compromise motion cobbled together at the last minute between the anti-CWI individuals and the CWI was, in my opinion, a vast improvement on both the original antagonistic motions. But Hannah Sell (SPEW observer at conference) and other CWI leaders must have been scratching their heads, perplexed as to what exactly is the point of uniting with others if CWI supporters intend to surrender even when they are in the majority! An excellent question.

Comrade McCombes tried to sell his liquidation of SML by reference to the American Trotskyists uniting with non-revolutionaries in the 1930s. However, while suggesting to Peter Taaffe that the SSP could become a CWI affiliate within a year or so, he was telling Allan Green, Hugh Kerr, Bill Bonnar, etc a very different story. Clearly the unapologetic social democratic wing of the SSP is not content with promises that CWI members will not outvote them at conference. They want guarantees. They clearly are the ones “suspicious and resentful” at the CWI “party within a party”. For precisely the same reasons as Neil Kinnock before them, they want it smashed to pieces. And, tragically, comrade McCombes is happy to oblige.

All revolutionaries, in Scotland and beyond, need to support the right of the Scottish CWI minority against this veiled attack on it. If comrades McCombes, Sheridan, Venton, Curran, Baldassarra, McKerral, etc have neither the energy nor commitment to entertain dual membership of the SSP and the CWI, then nobody is twisting their arms. Peter Taaffe has built no Berlin Wall; nor has he hired border guards charged with the task of imprisoning dissidents. They are at liberty to leave either (or both) organisations any time they like. And if comrade McCombes is a democrat, he ought to respect the right of Phil Stott, Harvey Duke and other CWI loyalists - comrades who clearly do intend to operate inside a broad workers’ party (and despite all the pretentious twaddle designating the SSP as a ‘party of a new type’, a broad workers’ party is precisely what it is) - and to do so as part of a “tightly knit caucus”, then that ought to be their right. If Phil, Harvey and others want to organise closed meetings of CWI supporters, to publicly distribute independent CWI literature, literature critical of named leading members of the SSP or of the leadership as a whole, and even to distribute (somewhat less publicly) internal bulletins, then that also is their right.

Although I disagree with Phil, Harvey and the rest of the CWI on the question of the single currency, on Ireland, on the question of a parliamentary road to socialism, on the possibility of socialism in an independent Scotland and much more besides, I support their right to organise inside the SSP as a coherent faction, just as I supported their right to do so when they operated inside the Labour Party. Comrade McCombes et al seem to have forgotten (if they ever understood it) that Lenin’s Bolsheviks operated inside the RSDLP as a “tightly knit caucus”, and that, from 1917 onwards, Lenin, Trotsky and all revolutionaries argued that the key reason why the workers’ revolution in Russia was successful, while it was defeated everywhere else, came down to the absence of such a party outside Russia. We can all argue over precisely what should be the rights of factions and minorities within Bolshevik-type parties, but the implied threat to supporters of Peter Taaffe (to liquidate his organisation, or to suffer the same fate dished out to them by Kinnock), is an attack on all revolutionaries inside the SSP.

Socialist Outlook supporters and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty members already operate inside the SSP. I do not know whether either has registered itself with the SSP executive as a faction. What is beyond doubt is that even if they have not, these individuals will be meeting together privately in order to prepare interventions at the level of branch, day school, conference, etc. The Kinnockite turn announced by comrade McCombes ought to act as a wake-up call to them also. They need to unite (as does the Republican Communist Network) with the Scottish CWI minority in defence of the right of Bolshevik-type factions inside the SSP.

If the Scottish CWI’s Kinnockites treat Socialist Outlook and the AWL with kid gloves (which may or not be part of their game-plan), that can only be explained by the inoffensiveness of these factions. And by inoffensiveness I mean, of course, utterly lacking in influence. It would be as counterproductive for comrade McCombes to pick a fight with them at this stage as it would have been for Harold Wilson to have picked a fight with Militant in the 1960s, to have done so when Ted Grant’s supporters were contemptuously dismissed as a joke rather than (as was subsequently the case) recognised as an ever more powerful, and well organised, group challenging for leadership of the party.

If comrade McCombes manages to push his prohibition of coherent factions through, this would be an unhealthy state of affairs, with paranoia, kangaroo courts and bitter ex-comrades constantly stabbing one another in the back. Hardly a conducive atmosphere within which to promote fraternal working class unity. But the responsibility for such a sickness, one that would paralyse the SSP, would be the property of those ‘Trotskyists’ who have surrendered to the prejudices of the SSP’s influential social democratic minority.

And the arguments cobbled together to justify the liquidation of factions (all factions other than McCombes’s own Kinnockite anti-faction faction) are bizarre in the extreme. One argument deployed against Peter Taaffe (although I cannot for the life of me understand why) was that the RCN (not mentioned by name) advocated that SSP MSPs refuse to swear the oath of allegiance, “a position that would not have been accepted or understood even by the most advanced sections of the working class”. Although I worked with members of the RCN at the time, I strongly disagree with their position of ‘on principle’ not swearing this oath, a stance motivated, in my opinion, by nothing more than an ultra-left moralism. But I cannot understand why this RCN position is an argument for revolutionaries liquidating their “tightly knit caucus” inside a broad workers’ party. If anything it is surely an argument for strengthening organisation rather than dissolving it. Had those who have subsequently separated into the majority and minority of the Scottish CWI not systematically hammered out (amongst their entire membership, in isolation from the broad workers’ party) a united position on the oath of allegiance, then it would have been more likely the RCN position could have carried the day.

Then there is the question of campaigning for mass non-payment of student fees. Several months ago the Paisley SSP branch held a meeting on student fees. Although a large percentage of contributors to the debate were members of the Scottish CWI (including two English comrades, who had, for over a decade, cut their political teeth as Militant supporters in England), I was the only SSP member to suggest that the meeting moves on from preaching to the converted about why fees were not a good thing, platitudes which even Paddy Ashdown and William Hague could, did, and still do, mouth. When I advanced the position that had, for several months, been outlined in the pages of The Socialist, I was told that a debate on the branch advocating a mass non-payment strategy was (more or less) ruled out of order.

Since the SSP executive was paralysed on this question, the branch had to wait for a definitive position to be handed down to us from on high. I was, thankfully, allowed to come back in and to point out that the reason Tommy Sheridan obtains votes substantially greater than other SSP candidates is directly related to his entering the public arena as the figurehead of the organisation of one of the most significant extra-parliamentary struggles Britain has seen this century. By his willingness to go to jail, rather than to surrender to the law enforcement agencies which tried to harass us into paying the deeply unpopular poll tax, Tommy has built up enormous reservoirs of goodwill amongst socialists in Scotland. Tommy, and the rest of the Scottish CWI leadership (both the majority and minority), have every reason to feel proud about the heroic role they played in this struggle. And yet what a difference between their attitude to the mass non-payment of the poll tax, on the one hand, and the campaign against student fees, on the other.

When Militant failed to win a majority inside the Labour Party, they did not think twice about acting independently. I fully expected that if the Scottish CWI could not instantly win the SSP executive to their position of opting for mass non-payment, then they would, once again, act independently. This would have been the right thing to do in order to further the struggle against fees. It would also (from a purely ‘sectarian’ point of view) strengthen the position of CWI members inside the SSP. Why precisely was comrade McCombes willing to surrender to the SSP’s social democratic minority on this issue, while he was not prepared to do it when Kinnock demanded surrender on the question of the poll tax? If the long delay in getting the SSP to adopt a strategy of non-payment is to be explained by the social democratic tail of the SSP wagging the ‘Trotskyist’ dog, then this only reinforces the arguments of revolutionaries that we need to be allowed the right to organise our own factions and, when necessary, to act independently of the party.

If the AWL, SO, RCN and Peter Taaffe’s loyalist section of the Scottish CWI are going to be faced with a united offensive by the social democratic elements of the SSP, in conjunction with the majority of the Scottish CWI, then it is imperative that we coordinate the defence of our rights.

Hopefully, if ex-supporters of the CWI start to attack the rights of a genuine CWI faction inside the SSP, they will see the sense of coordinating the defence of all revolutionaries inside the SSP. Peter Taaffe does not need to like, or even overly trust, members of SO, AWL, RCN or myself in order to see the sense of coordinating the defence of minority rights inside the SSP. Comrade McCombes might want to take in Peter Taaffe’s supporters first, and only then to pick a fight with the rest of us. We cannot allow ourselves to be defeated by a cynical use of such divide and rule tactics. Even socialists who are not members of any of the above revolutionary groups - even those who have no intention of ever joining any “tightly knit caucus” - have an incentive to oppose these plans to smash revolutionary factions inside the SSP.